You’re doing your own thing today to mark Mother’s Day. And we’re doing ours.
While you’re whipping up brunch for your mom, or picking up the phone to say “I love you,” we’re paying tribute to some other great Colorado mothers. We’re certain that your mom is top-notch and has earned her place in your personal history. But there are a few other moms who have graced our state and are definitely worth remembering.
MOTHER CABRINI
The patron saint of immigrants, Frances X. Cabrini – known as “Mother Cabrini” – was a big fan of Colorado. In 1910 she bought some acreage on the west side of Lookout Mountain, w hich was used as a summer camp for girls. She also started Queen of Heaven Orphanage in Denver. Since then, various buildings, including a convent, have been built. The Mother Cabrini Shrine still looms over the area and it’s open to visitors.
ROSEANNE BARR
The comic genius and sitcom star was neither born nor raised in Colorado (she’s a Utah gal), but Colorado is where she lived as a young mom, and Denver is where she got her start as a comic. So we’ll claim her.
She’s had a wild career: part-time window dresser, cocktail waitress, local stand-up comic, international stand-up comic, groundbreaking sitcom star, Broadway actor, talk-show host and star of her own reality TV show.
She’s best known for her role as a tough-loving working-class mom on her show “Roseanne,” which ran from 1988 to 1997. But she’s a real-life mom herself. And a grandmother.
MOTHER JONES
Not the magazine. The woman. Born in Ireland, raised in Canada, Mary Harris Jones dedicated a balance of her life to helping others and fighting injustices, particularly those directed against workers.
Colorado didn’t figure into her life until she was in her 80s, but when the mine workers in southern Colorado began launching strikes in 1913, she traveled to Huerfano County to support them. She was jailed twice. When Colorado National Guard soldiers shot and killed 20 people, Mother Jones took the story to Washington, where politicians listened.
She also was a mother, but she lost all four of her kids – as well as her husband – to yellow fever.
WILDLIFE MOTHERS
Bear and lion cubs, elk and moose calves, eagle eaglets, trout fry – all of them depend upon their mamas for protection from the wild world, at least for a bit. And without its rich wildlife, Colorado would be a much different – and less invigorating – place. Let’s hear it for all of those wildlife moms out there. And let’s mother them, too. They need our protection as much as the furry, feathered and scaly little ‘uns need their mothers.
FLOWERING BULBS
Like it or leave it, Mother’s Day wraps itself not in patriotic bunting, but flowers, blooms, blossoms of all sorts. Bulbs do especially well here because many of them – tulips, for example – hail originally from the steppes of Central Asia, the climate of which doesn’t differ so much from ours.
We celebrate our opulence of bulbs, our brilliant, velvety blooms that will decorate lawns and gardens for another few weeks. And on Mother’s Day – of all days – we should at least stop and study a tulip or 12, and if we’re fond of flowery Mother’s Days, snip a few and plunge them into a vase.
MOTHER LODE
Colorado’s strong mining tradition gave us Victorian small towns that thrive today, and ghost towns. Great wealth and enormous, deadly toil. Access to backcountry (pulling minerals out of those hills spurred railroads, trails, roads and more) and stripped mountainsides, poisoned water and challenged ecosystems.
The mother lode is the main vein of either the gold or silver being mined. The mother lode shaped our state in a variety of significant ways. The mother lode never mattered much in Louisiana or Maine, Illinois, Texas or Delaware. But it was central to Colorado’s development, and we all live in its ripples today.
